As an Independent Insurance Agent, like any small business owner or entrepreneur, one of the perks and downfalls of your situation is that work only gets done if you or your staff do it.

But, do you ever get to 5pm and feel like you haven’t done as much as you wanted? Or perhaps you feel like you didn’t do much at all, even though you just spent a significant fraction of your day there?

You’re not alone. Sometimes, the busier we get the less productive we can be. We try by keeping the messages in our inbox at zero and writing better memos, but really what we need is the one hard and fast rule of productivity: Focus. Focus. Focus.

Laura Vanderkam, author of I Know How She Does It, has studied 1,001 days in the lives of professional women and has run up against that very truth. The way these powerful, career-driven women balance their lives effectively is by harnessing the most focus they can.

Vanderkam argues that most of us have space to lean in harder into our professions if we want to, without spending more time than we are now. To do this, she promotes spending our most focused time on our high-value activities, instead of work that will expand to the time we give to it.

Beware of “fake breaks”
The human brain can only concentrate for so long. When we don’t take real breaks, we take fake ones, cruising around on the web following click-bait links. Paradoxically, you can work more hours (that is, real hours) by taking a purposeful break every few hours or so. Go outside. Call a loved one. You’ll return to your desk recharged and ready to go.
Finally, accept this: you will never reach the bottom of your inbox. Rather than staying late hacking through it, perform a 4 p.m. triage. What absolutely has to get answered by tomorrow? Most things don’t. You can make a note of “for later” items and respond to them all during a low-value period when it’s hard to start much else (e.g. Friday afternoon).

Implement this strategy into your workday and see how you’re able to get more done.

If you need help with your high-value tasks like quoting insurance risks online, or if you have a quick question and need to chat with us now, we at Abram Interstate are here to help. We want to see you succeed, and we know you can.

Abram Interstate Insurance Services, Inc. is a California wholesale insurance broker (CMGA) that has licensing and expertise to place business in both admitted and non-admitted markets for Personal Lines Insurance, Commercial Lines Insurance, and Agribusiness Insurance in California and surrounding areas.